The Fraunhofer institute IAO opened today a new interaction lab in Stuttgart under the topic interaction with all senses. Prof. Spath, director of the Fraunhofer IAO, made a strong argument for new user interfaces. In his talk he discussed adaptive cruse control in cars as an example for user interface challenges.

Prof. Jürgen Ziegler, a colleague at the University of Duisburg-Essen who was previously at IAO, showed in his talk a short video of a “galvanic vestibular stimulation” GVS explored by NTT (SIGGRAPH 2005 Demo) to highlight trends and indicate at the same time ethical problems that can arise when we interfere with human senses.

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

TEI’08 will be held in cooperation with ACM and the proceedings will, as last year, included in the ACM digital library.After finalizing the review and discussion process we have a really amazing program, which will be soon online at http://www.tei-conf.org/.

Before the seminar we had a chance to see the lab of Steffi Beckhaus. I have tried the ChairIO – and it was fun. They sound floor creates a really interesting experience (similar to the butt-kicker just more intense). We could also play with GranulatSynthese and try the smell user interface (apple smell is absolutely convincing, not sure about some of the others).

We had some discussion on emotions and capturing physiological parameters. Thinking about emotions and senses with regard to a community sharing them opens up a lot of potential for new experiences and potentially applications. We discussed this topic to some extent some weeks ago at the Human Computer Confluence Workshop in Brussels. I really thing a small scale experience in share emotions could move us forward and provide some more insight. In Hamburg they have the NeXus-system (perhaps we should get this too and create a networked application).